DOM-based content extraction of HTML documents

Abstract

Web pages often contain clutter (such as pop-up ads, unnecessary images and extraneous links) around the body of an article that distracts a user from actual content. Extraction of "useful and relevant" content from web pages has many applications, including cell phone and PDA browsing, speech rendering for the visually impaired, and text summarization. Most approaches to removing clutter or making content more readable involve changing font size or removing HTML and data components such as images, which takes away from a webpage's inherent look and feel. Unlike "Content Reformatting", which aims to reproduce the entire webpage in a more convenient form, our solution directly addresses "Content Extraction". We have developed a framework that employs easily extensible set of techniques that incorporate advantages of previous work on content extraction. Our key insight is to work with the DOM trees, rather than with raw HTML markup. We have implemented our approach in a publicly available Web proxy to extract content from HTML web pages.